Serendipity

It was a dark and stormy long and frustrating weekend. Last week, I THOUGHT my quilt was ready to be layered and basted, in preparation for quilting. However, as soon as I tried to smooth the top over the stretched backing and batting, it became abundantly clear that the borders were cut too small. In my efforts to prevent a wavy border (a far too frequent problem I encounter), I over-compensated - grrrr - and made the borders far shorter than they should have been.

Of course, this meant that the interior of the quilt pooched out. While it is possible to ease a little bit of excess fabric in the machine quilting process, the amount of bulge I had was far too much to safely quilt out.

Needless to say, there were copious tears shed, a few expletives uttered, temporary denial expressed, more than a little stomping and door slamming and finally the onset of a monster migraine as a result. While I was disgusted with the mistake I had made and irritated by the fact that I didn't have enough fabric left to re-do the border, what was most disheartening was the reality that I had at least 8 hours of ripping and re-sewing ahead of me.

After some migraine medications and a little cooling off period, I launched into a marathon ripping session, which included quite a bit of time spent picking loose threads from ripped seams and vacuuming up the resulting mess. Unsewing is a very untidy process, especially when you have 12 long seams to be taken back out. Ugggh.

Then I headed out to the local quilt shop to find a new border fabric. The first shop I visited had a few things that might have worked but I wasn't 100% satisfied with any of them. So I headed over to another local quilt shop. I have to say that the customer service at this shop was superb. I had three sales people converge on me as I entered, spread out the quilt on the cutting table and then scatter to search for fabric. Within 5 minutes, we had found the perfect fabric for the border.

To say that this fabric is better than the original border would be an understatement of epic proportions. I LOVE the new border. A better color match couldn't have been found without dying the fabric myself. I bought a little extra to use for pillow shams and may have to go back for more for pillow cases and/or a bed skirt. I am so thrilled with the new border that I'm actually a little glad that I messed up the original borders.

It just goes to show you that every cloud has a silver lining. And trust me, this cloud was a big, black, stormy one that managed to produce one glorious silver lining.

Now I call that Serendipity - with a big "S"!